Tag: jeremy corbyn

The mainstream media today confirmed the Tories commitment to equality and social justice with their announcement of their plans to ensure that UK citizens aged 18-22 are (in line with anti-EU discrimination law), to be exempt from the same rights to tax credits, child benefit and housing benefit as their immigrant counterparts.

Government lawyers have stated: “Imposing additional requirements on EU workers that do not apply to a member state’s own workers constitutes direct discrimination which is prohibited under current EU law” (1).

So, apparently, in order to be compliant with EU law, UK citizens within the 18-22 age group must forgo these benefits on the basis that it’s discriminatory because immigrants are not entitled to them.

But instead of raising the bar by insisting that both UK citizens and immigrants within this age range be entitled to benefits on an equal basis, the Tories have decided to lower it by insisting that neither group are entitled to anything. In other words, equality in the gutter as opposed to equality at the dinner table.

The reason so many immigrants – many of whom risk their lives – want to come here is because of the perception that the UK is a relative economic powerhouse. However, any cuts to benefits will not deter people who are primarily motivated by the need to improve the lives of themselves and their families as a result of perceived greater work opportunities this country allegedly offers.

The government have done nothing to dispel myths that the UK is a land of milk and honey. This would suggest that their plan to cut welfare across the board in order to adhere to EU law was planned. As blogger Mike Sivier put it: “The migrant situation is a crisis of the Tories’ own making and they are using it to hammer their own fellow citizens” (2).

So what next do the government have in the pipeline you might reasonably ask?

The Tories are ideologically opposed to the welfare state. This latest move is, I would suggest, part and parcel of their intention to get rid of it altogether by stealth. It’s a remarkable state of affairs when our only hope out of this morass appears to be Jeremy Corbyn.

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I was in my local cafe earlier today and nearly choked on my bacon sandwich at the sheer audacity of the banksters. I happened to glance over at the adjacent table at the copy of the Daily Mail somebody had left open. I generally detest this rag, but have to admit that every now and then it does come up with the occasional nugget.

The paper does appear of late to be on a mission to undermine Osborne and the Tories. As I alluded to in post on August 4, it was clear that the Tory Aristocrat had garnered some insider knowledge prior to the part sell off of RBS thus providing the opportunity for his mates in the City to, once again, pillage the public purse- this time to the tune of a cool £1bn (1).

This was money which no doubt could have been better spent on bailing out a non-taxable status charitable organisation like, for example, Kids Company run by Camila Batman (and robber?) ghelidjh. Maybe an extra billion added to the £3 million Cameron nodded through to the bankrupt charity would have saved it?

But anyway back to the latest banking scandal. With her insider knowledge and connections as a former City banker, it’s highly conceivable that Treasury minister, Harriet Baldwin. who defended the sell-off, would have advised Osborne on the matter.

The Daily Mail’s Banking Correspondent, James Salmon, revealed that hedge funds rushed to gamble on RBS – a ploy known in the market as ‘shorting’ – “may have generated profits of more than £10 million, This is because the bank’s share price fell in the days before the government sell-off.” (2).

Labour MP John Mann, a member of the Treasury select committee, said: “Yet again hedge funds and bankers are making money and the public are losing out.” (3). A few days ago former City trader, Tom Hayes,was given a 14 year sentence for his role in rigging the Libor interest rate. (4). But he is merely the sacrificial lamb for a much wider and systematic corruption that begins at the very top. The fact that these kinds of abuses are allowed to continue in the context in which people struggling on benefits are jailed for stealing food (5), is the scandal of our time.

The former Republican analyst Mike Lofgren, disgusted with what his party had become, said the following about the economic elite in the United States:

“The rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot. Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it ” (6).

He might as well of been talking about the UK, which is basically little more than the 51st state. Osborne and Cameron identify more readily with a transnational elite than with the other people of this nation. The proof is in the pudding. On behalf of this elite, the government gives away a staggering £93bn a year in corporate welfare – a sum bigger than the deficit.(7). It champions the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership; a graver threat to the interests of this nation than Islamic extremism.

And yet there is a iron-cast consensus between the Tories and the Labour hierarchy in terms of their unwillingness to tackle the problem. This explains why the latter distance themselves from the populist Jeremy Corbyn who wants to put and end to this kind of revolving door political cronyism.

The real benefit spongers are not those who feature on low brow documentary programmes, but rather they are the elites who occupy the corridors of the plush buildings within the City of London.

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A sign is displayed outside of a branch of The Royal Bank of Scotland in central London, Britain May 20, 2015.

REUTERS/NEIL HALL

The UK Chancellor’s announcement that he plans to sell-off £2 billion worth of the 79 per cent stake the government has in RBS over the coming fortnight is, according to Unite national officer for finance Rob MacGregor, “recklessly irresponsible”(1). RBS shares that stood at £6.88 in 2007, are now valued at £3.30 (2). It should be noted that the shares have not been offered to the people who bailed out RBS, that is us, the taxpayers but to the Tories’ city friends.

The decision by Aristocrat Gideon Osborne, who seems set to be next in line to take the reins of PM from his friend David Cameron (3), and who promised action on tax avoidance (4), despite the fact that his family business has avoided tax (5), is defended by Treasury minister, Harriet Baldwin. Why would she defend the sell-off which will result in a £1bn loss to taxpayers, you may ask?

Well, it could have something to do with her connections within in the banking racket. Having joined investment bank JP Morgan Chase in 1986, she then became managing director and Head of Currency Management at their London office in 1998. She left the bank in 2008, after more than two decades with the bank (6). Maybe she has advised Cameron to get shot of the RBS millstone before his transition to PM.

To sell these shares when business is slow, many are on holiday and the stock market depressed, means its the opportune time for these scoundrels to defraud us for the second time round, which of course is really what this latest scandal is all about.

If, after this latest act by the page boy to his dads banker friends in order to further the interests of the banking racketeers, won’t have awaken the masses from their slumber, then I fear nothing will. There is no clearer illustration we are being taken for a ride than the governments collusion with the bankers as highlighted by this sell-off. Austerity amounts to the raiding of the public coffers to bolster the pockets of the super-rich (7).

As economist Andrew Fisher alludes, this is clearly an ideological and dogmatic move by Osborne, not a financially pragmatic one:

“Banks that owe their continuing existence to public funds should be acting in the public interest — investing in the productive economy, reducing the margins between their lending rates and savers’ rates, and ending the fat-cat bonus culture at the top, while underpaying and laying off cashiers at the other end.”(8).

The Financial Times reported yesterday (August 3) that Osborne wants to flog off £32bn worth of public assets by the end of the financial year, as part of a strategy to reduce the role of the state that will do nothing to stimulate growth (9). The £32bn worth of public asset stripping that is to include the Met Office, Ordnance Survey and air traffic controller Nats, breaks even Thatcher’s record (10).

We are not in this mess because politicians are stupid but because of the cozy relationship that exists between them and the bankers who the latter lobby on behalf of (11). The Guardian outlines how it all works. A commentator on Craig Murray’s blog argued that:

“The entire RBS saga is a scam from start to finish:

• All banks make huge profits by lending prodigiously. • Concentrate bad debts in a few banks. • Instill ‘too big to fail’ meme. • Order politicians to ‘nationalise’ compromised banks at huge cost to tax-payers. • Continue injecting billions until ‘nationalised’ banks have paid off the lion’s share of bad debt. • Sell bank back to bankers at knock-down price” (12).

Another commentator from the same blog makes another apt point:

“Note the bastards didn’t buy voting shares in RBS: the taxpaying sucker didn’t even have the opportunity to reform the bank. Lovely little restructure: the retail arm goes to another retail bank for a knockdown price (W&G may not have been too wise buying it even then), while the crooked division ends up divvied up between hedge funds. And lives to cheat another day” (13).

Don’t forget dear readers, we are all in it with the aim of getting the deficit down.

Given the Liberal Democrat’s close ideological proximity to the Tories during their power sharing term, and their subsequent virtual demise following the last election, the strategic move by Harman and the party hierarchy is clearly a calculable risk.

Harman’s assumption appears to be that there is no longer any more political and electoral traction to be gained by appealing to a diminishing band of traditional left wing voters. But the question is, are the abandoned merely lying dormant and waiting to be awoken from their slumber by a parliamentary opposition worthy of the name?

If we accept that the class structure remains in tact and that the real life experiences of the vast majority in the country will be made worse by the impending cuts, then rationally the answer to the question is they will at some point make their voice heard. But neither Harman or any of the Blairites competing for the leadership will be the catalyst.

In essence, there is no fundamental difference between the people of England and the people of Scotland. And yet, with the exception of a solitary seat, the latter wiped out from power a pro-austerity party, while the opposite was true for the former.

Outside the relatively small band of Labour Party dissenters, the opposition to benefit cuts in England will come from the SNP, Plaid and the Greens. The dominance of the SNP in Scotland and the popularity of both Jeremy Corbyn and Nicola Sturgeon, puts the lie to many of the claims in the corporate media that you have to be right wing to win elections. The forthcoming labour leadership battle is likely to bring this myth into even more of a sharper focus.

The reality is the people of England are inherently no more right wing than the people of Scotland. But the media who marginalize, ridicule and smear those with left wing views, most certainly are. So it’s not a question of their being no appetite for left wing views among the public, rather, the issue is one in which a right wing consensus is arrived at between the political establishment and the media. This is a policy that works.

We can expect greater media vilification of Corbyn as his campaign gains momentum in the coming period. The notion that a singular right wing ideological elite are first and foremost motivated by an overriding quest for the reins of power, has been addressed by former UK Ambassador, Craig Murray.

As Murray contends, persuasively, not only are the supposed parameters between left and right upon which electoral battles are fought based largely on an illusion, but as evidenced by successively low electoral turnouts, there is little enthusiasm for their leaders either.

Nevertheless, since Blair’s election victory in 1997, successive Tory-lite labour strategists have appeared to have taken the view that the preferred direction of travel for the party is that which is undertaken by their opponent. This ignores the fact that this ‘race to the bottom’ is in nobody’s interests other than the narrow careerist and financial ones of those at the top. And that, as far as Harman is concerned, is clearly the crux of the matter.

Increasingly, the political battle lines are being drawn, not between the ruling party and the opposition, but between the ruling party, opposition and the rest of us. I don’t remember a time when the disconnect between the political establishment and the people has been greater. For the vast majority of the political establishment and their paymasters in the corporate media, they really are all in it together. But that doesn’t mean that left wing views are unelectable as Nicola Sturgeon has shown. Maybe Jeremy will become England’s Nicola. We need him.

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Following Harriet Harman’s admission that the purpose of the Labour Party is to outflank the tories at the expense of any allusion to principle, she might have just put the final nail in the coffin of the party, That said, the heart of the beast hasn’t stopped beating quite yet and it could be revived if leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn comes to its rescue by winning the forthcoming battle.

Harman’s claim that she would not oppose Tory benefit cuts was only surprising in the sense that she was being frank about it. Should Labour die and what remains of the corpse align themselves with the Greens and other progressives, the English people will be reliant on the SNP coming to their aid on their behalf.

Just as the bankers are now in a stronger position than they were prior to Syriza in Greece coming to power as a result of the former’s usurping of national Greek sovereignty, so too will the Tories should Corbyn lose..

In challenging the Osborne/Harman narrative, what used to pass as positively centrist, is now regarded as dangerously revolutionary, particularly when the issue of raising taxes for the rich is concerned..This is what Corbyn had to say to Sky’s Adam Boulton yesterday evening:

Corbyn:

“I think we have made a mistake on giving so much ground to Osborne, particularly on the treatment of young people in the budget and treatment of people in larger families. Why should the third and subsequent amount of children be penalized depending on the random date in which they happen to be born?

Boulton:

“Why should the tax payer support larger families”?

Corbyn:

“We have a system in which even Thatcher signed a European convention protecting the rights of the child. What number were you”?

Boulton:

“I’m playing devils advocate. This is only going to be introduced for future families and that they have a choice as to how many children they have. Surely encouraging families to have a smaller amount of children must be a good thing.”

Corbyn:

“I agree. But they don’t need encouragement. People having small families happens anyway. The average family size over the last 50 years has come down. But because of the idea that there are some large families, that children should be penalized for being born, is simply not right. We could cut rising welfare expenditure by capping rents thus saving on housing benefit and improving drastically the living wage thereby undercutting the subsidising of low pay paid through benefits – a system that currently works to the advantage of large multinationals like Tesco. We need to pay people more so the tax yield is greater and the economy does better. It’s a win-win situation.”

Boulton:

“How are you going to pay for it”?

Corbyn:

“We have to raise the taxes of the wealthiest. Over the last few years, child poverty has increased, homelessness has increased, the use of food banks has increased and overcrowding in houses has increased. So we need a different and more humane approach to welfare.”